Dreaming of Estrogen

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I once had a writing teacher say never to write about your dreams: they hold no interest, she said, except to the person who's had them. But at the risk of proving her right, I'm going to write about my dream anyway because it encapsulates the dilemma that affects my waking hours and now, it appears, my sleeping ones as well.

I dreamt I was picking up a prescription for hormone therapy, and, as I was picking them up and talking to the pharmacist, he told me that I'd have to take 60 pills every day. "60 pills!" I exclaimed. "60 pills for what's supposed to be a natural process!" I was shouting and upsetting the other customers when my doctor – an older man wearing a white medical jacket – came along and told me to be quiet. I asked why he hadn't let me know when he'd prescribed the hormones that I'd be taking 60 of them. "Too much information," he replied. "You didn't need to know."

Didn't need to know? I was furious. What else was the doctor not telling me? So I insisted the pharmacist rip up the prescription and wouldn't leave until I saw him do it.

So there you have it: my ambivalence about hormones in a nutshell. Part of me really wants them – I think of the potential benefit to my brain which is feeling the fading estrogen – but do I trust the good doctors, male or female, to be prescribing them in my best interests? Or are there other things about hormone therapy that we just don't know yet? Then there's the contradiction of having to take a pill for what's supposed to be just a natural transition, as I shouted in my dream.

But later on, either in my dream or my semi-waking state, I remembered the estrogen patch. No pills. Just patch. Now that may be a prescription I would fill.